"The promise of interactivity is that viewers can be cultural producers as well as consumers-that furthermore, their participatory consumption can be creative and fulfilling"
----> Digital Enclosure: " the creation of interactive realm wherein every action and transaction generates information about itself"
"meant to evoke the ;amid enclosure movement associated with the transition from feudalism to capitalism, the process whereby over time communal land was subjected to private control"
Thoughts :
First of, reading this book is very interesting. Apart from loving the eye on the cover of the book I find points the author makes interesting. His theory on Internet surveillance had an impact on me.
A privacy concern that's almost scary to read. Reading a lot of the books we have read for class this so far has been the one that has provided me with the most concern. I have never really thought about the POWER and the INTERACTIVE era aspect of the Internet. He brings up many points on Internet control that as consumers we don't really focus on. I don't see it as people watching me but rather just a source of entertainment. This book served as an eye opener.
In the first few chapters he discusses geo-based technology and the use of the wireless network for all in San Francisco. Although, this is great because people are able to have access to the Internet everywhere he points out some of the negative aspects of this surveillance and power that rises with how accessible the Internet has become. People usually look unto google for information or to purchase items. Google gives us links to or ads to grasp the consumers attention based on what they already know the consumer has looked up or recently purchased. ( we never told them to advertise anything for us however they still do)
The book made me aware of the one thing that I am the most concerned about! Privacy! Does Google even have a right to know my location! Nothing today is actually really private. We have cell phones in which we now openly admit our location (I couldn't stop thinking about this while reading the first chapters: Face book now has a feature that allows you to check in to the area that you are located.) Andrejevic makes the point that interactivity simply means the loss of initial freedoms. We are tracked no matter what we do online. "This book argues that the developyment of the promise of interactivity in commercial and political contexts underwrites, participation in top-down forms of management and control rather than in democratic self governance." We gave up our rights to privacy once we accept this technology.
However, I found it interesting that as I perceived through the next chapter as he talks about the Internet culture and its great impact on us. Andrevejic points out something that triggered me. He talks about Google becoming a verb and a proper noun over time. We generate information about ourselves through sites like Google making it easy for people to stalk each other and be informed about the others life. The Internet has become a world filled with our most personal information. I liked the example that Andrejevic used about the women who stalked her lover online thanks to sites such as Google. He goes as far as to talk about parents tracking their kids through phones GPS systems. Reading the first 2 chapters kind of scared me into thinking hard about what the world is becoming. Out of all the books we have read this is the one that makes me a little uneasy. As I typed my blog I thought about being watched and privacy vanishing. The points he makes our things we really don't think of when we put up statuses or look up information online.
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